ian's latest speeches in parliament

Good Evening. I’d firstly like to thank the National Parks Association of NSW for holding tonight’s talk. Their enduring and passionate commitment to conservation is invaluable to the environment movement. I know over the years they have been front and centre in Parliament strongly advocating for the integrity of our national park system. As we face this new campaign - some would say onslaught - NPA is again pulling out all stops to make sure protection of our national parks, marine parks and nature reserves are not weakened. For this they should be applauded.  

Also, thank you to the previous speakers Dr. Martin Taylor, Prof Ralf Buckley and Andrew Cox for their insightful and thoughtful contributions. I’d also like to thank all those attending tonight for registering your concern over how the NSW Government, in our name, intends to ‘modernise’ NSW national parks.   

On the eve of significant reform to our NSW national park system it is critical that evenings such as this ignite broader public awareness and debate about how the people of NSW, not corporate Australia, want their national parks managed and cared for. As stated in the 2004 State of the Parks Report;

“The primary purpose of the NSW park system is to provide security in perpetuity for the state’s natural and cultural heritage.”

These are the words of our peak Environment Department in NSW. 5 years on we must not deviate from this principle that has resonance from the local community up to the global stage. 

Imagine what type of society we would live in if every person visited a NSW National Park just once each year. Imagine the transformation in ethics and aesthetic appreciation. Imagine how we would relate to each other. National Parks are not some magical cure for all of societies ills but I think there is something to be said for how enveloping oneself in a forest or ocean changes a person. Sure this might sound like clichéd, abstract ‘hail mother earth’ hippie talk, but it is real, and there is no shame in the admission that we as humans find peace and insight from the natural environment. 

Looking at the NSW State Plan objective to increase national park visitation rates by 20% in 2016 it could be said that the government would agree with the sentiment I just expressed - although they would never dare express it in that way. Whether the NSW Government seeks to achieve this objective purely because they want to share their love of national parks or the aim is more to boost park revenue and regional tourism isn’t important. The fact is the NSW Government wants more people to visit NSW national parks and with that we cannot disagree.

The question that the Tourism Taskforce should have been tasked with was to find ways to achieve higher visitation rates without adverse ecological impacts and subjugation of conservation values. Instead they delivered a sad and ill-conceived narrative littered with corporate lexicon buzzwords, advocating the need for high ecological impact accommodation in NSW’s most sensitive ecosystems. Only when we peal back the ambiguous double speak can we glean a more accurate picture of the NSW Government vision for ‘tourism’ in NSW national parks.

Pursuing these reforms amidst a political environment mired in a suffocating level of cronyism and duplicity will result in the Government’s corporate patrons appropriating what rightful should remain in public hands. Capitulation over developer industry demands and the privatisation of our natural capital will prejudice access to viable national parks for future generations ahead. It will threaten the very environmental integrity of our national parks.

The embedding of the corporate developer pathology into NSW Labor creates stark implications for reforms to tourism in national parks. In adopting the recommendations of the Taskforce, the NSW Government has bought into a domineering tourism narrative that seeks to deliver cash into the hands of a small cabal of corporate developers rather than increase regional development and national park visitation. The Taskforce bemoans the locking out of society’s cashed up elite who want to experience nature but can’t stand to get mud and dirt on their shoes or brush up again forest foliage. 

To remedy this inequity and lost market opportunity the Taskforce recommends the creation of nature tourism experiences more attune to the tastes of this forgotten and neglected target market. However, in order to service this demographic the Taskforce believes significant infrastructure and accommodation must be built within national park borders and that the development approval process must be streamlined to encourage investor support.           

This line of reasoning was pushed by the National Landscapes Program, which stated;

“From a tourism perspective the desired outcome could be yield not volume. It may make far more tourism (and conservation) strategic sense to have lower numbers of high yield visitors than higher numbers of low yield visitors.”

The National Landscapes Program appears to be pushing an illogical assumption that a high volume of nature skilled park users who don’t require the same level of infrastructure to support their tourism experiences and will not spend as much money in parks have a higher ecological footprint than those select few that can afford high cost, high impact infrastructure supported experiences. For a peak government agency to be making such unfounded claims is irresponsible. What this submission is actually saying to the NSW Government is that forget about increasing national park visitors as a NSW State Plan benchmark, the benchmark should be grounded in increasing per visitor expenditure.    

The Ministerial Taskforce picks up on this concept by citing a Tourism Victoria Report from 2008 that suggests that different nature tourism participants have different tourism infrastructure needs. Although the Taskforce acknowledges visitor satisfaction surveys worldwide have demonstrated the majority of visitors to parks and reserves prefer minimal infrastructure consisting of a limited number of visitor facilities such as walking tracks, lookouts, and maps and directional signs for independent park exploration, the Taskforce urges the NSW Government to adapt to the alleged changing composition of tourism participant markets based upon the markets the Tourism Victoria Report identifies. So who is this new target market?

The Taskforce calls them the “Comfort in Nature Tourism Participants”. The report states;

“These participants will undertake activities for shorter durations; many lack the skills to undertake the activities without a guide; require appropriate accommodation and facilities; and make up a large proportion (85%) of the market for nature tourism. . . Comfort in nature participants are a higher yielding market ”

Here again we have this concept of tourism yield. The concept of tourism yield – a smaller number of highincome earners paying premiums for nature tourism experience. The question is how do we reconcile NSW State Plan objectives when the Tourism industry stakeholders are only interested not in raw numbers but ‘yield’. The NSW Government charged the Taskforce with finding ways to satisfy State Plan objectives to increase National Park visitation and the Taskforce response has been to emphatically suggest an emphasis on high end, high ecological impact nature tourism experiences as opposed to measure to increase the general public’s engagement with national parks. 
 
With the impetus of the Taskforce recommendations behind them the Government will take measures to water down the National Parks and Wildlife Act. We have witnessed during 14 years of Labor’s continual incursions on the sanctity of the national park system and the stage is certainly set for an unravelling of national park protections of a magnitude not seen. 

Looking back to 2004 the Carr Government with all its hasty fervour for Hollywood blockbuster filmmakers to spend big in NSW happily paved the way for the producers of “Stealth” to trample through the Grose Wilderness of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Recalling the words of Justice Lloyd in Blue Mountains Conservation Society Inc v Director-General National Parks and Wildlife;  “wilderness areas are sacrosanct and the proposed commercial filming in a wilderness area is completely antipathetic to the intended use of the land”. Former Premier Carr’s description of conservationist actions as ‘selfish’ demonstrated the Government’s commitment to exploit our sensitive ecological systems at any environmental cost. If we strip our national park legislation of its integrity we will be mercy of the ideological vagrancy of the major parties in NSW  

Then we have Environmental Planning and Assessment Act Part 3A Application in relation to developments both bordering and within National Parks potentially facing a very streamlined and efficient approval process. Developer prospects are particularly good considering that in 2007-08, 99.6% or 295 out of 296 Part 3A applications were approved notwithstanding the 27% increase in public submissions.

But maybe the tourism and developer industries are trying to go even one better than Part 3A. In 2005, Western Australia launched its Landbank Initiative whereby ‘developer/investor ready’ tourism site with streamlined development approval processes were made available across 72 sites, some within national parks. In NSW the process would see Tourism NSW take the reins on providing a streamlined development process with minimal community and stakeholder consultation to accelerate tourism investment around iconic NSW locations.

We can stop this. Our State needs to see what is on the line here. I urge you to go back to your local communities and spread the word about what the Rees Government is going to set in motion. Write letters to the editor, lobby your local member and talk to your neighbour. For every Labor or Liberal corporate fund raising dinner take a friend who hasn’t visited a National Park in NSW to see the humbling beauty contained within the park boundaries. For every brown paper bag a developer is stuffing full of cash, send 10 photos of NSW National Parks to your friends, colleagues and family. Send them to me, I’ll post them on my website and demand that Rees and Co take a long hard look before they hit the start button on commercial overdevelopment in our National Parks.

We must combat the full force of the irresponsible developers with our best weapon - the unmediated pristine ecosystems, marine systems and forests of our National Parks.